African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s

African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s PDF Author: Sandra Hollin Flowers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781315790053
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Bringing together political theory and literary works, this study recreates the political climate which made the 1960s an unforgettable era for young black Americans. A chapter on "The Many Shades of Black Nationalism," for instance, explains: why black nationalism is known by more than a dozen different names; how events in Africa influenced black nationalism in America; why Malcolm X's death had a greater impact on nationalism than did his life; and how the United States government unwittingly became nationalism's ally. Another chapter explores the bitter feud between the dominant factions of the 1960s-cultural and revolutionary nationalists. This feud erupted in both verbal and armed warfare and generated an abundance of political theory and literary works, much of which is out of circulation but is examined in the study. Nationalist poetry, theater, and fiction are each treated in separate chapters which exemplify the aesthetic and political concerns of this memorable period in American history and letters. Aside from its unique combination of artistic and political works, what makes this book important is the current revival of nationalist sentiment in African American life and arts. Though this revival is closely identified with the nationalism of the 1960s, it lacks the focus of that period. This study explains what gave the nationalism of the 1960s its focus, how that focus was expressed in art forms, and why 1960s nationalism continues to influence the African American identity and will probably do so well into the twenty-first century.

African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s

African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s PDF Author: Sandra Hollin Flowers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781315790053
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing together political theory and literary works, this study recreates the political climate which made the 1960s an unforgettable era for young black Americans. A chapter on "The Many Shades of Black Nationalism," for instance, explains: why black nationalism is known by more than a dozen different names; how events in Africa influenced black nationalism in America; why Malcolm X's death had a greater impact on nationalism than did his life; and how the United States government unwittingly became nationalism's ally. Another chapter explores the bitter feud between the dominant factions of the 1960s-cultural and revolutionary nationalists. This feud erupted in both verbal and armed warfare and generated an abundance of political theory and literary works, much of which is out of circulation but is examined in the study. Nationalist poetry, theater, and fiction are each treated in separate chapters which exemplify the aesthetic and political concerns of this memorable period in American history and letters. Aside from its unique combination of artistic and political works, what makes this book important is the current revival of nationalist sentiment in African American life and arts. Though this revival is closely identified with the nationalism of the 1960s, it lacks the focus of that period. This study explains what gave the nationalism of the 1960s its focus, how that focus was expressed in art forms, and why 1960s nationalism continues to influence the African American identity and will probably do so well into the twenty-first century.

African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s

African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s PDF Author: Sandra Hollin Flowers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317731352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Bringing together political theory and literary works, this study recreates the political climate which made the 1960s an unforgettable era for young black Americans. A chapter on "The Many Shades of Black Nationalism," for instance, explains: why black nationalism is known by more than a dozen different names; how events in Africa influenced black nationalism in America; why Malcolm X's death had a greater impact on nationalism than did his life; and how the United States government unwittingly became nationalism's ally. Another chapter explores the bitter feud between the dominant factions of the 1960s-cultural and revolutionary nationalists. This feud erupted in both verbal and armed warfare and generated an abundance of political theory and literary works, much of which is out of circulation but is examined in the study. Nationalist poetry, theater, and fiction are each treated in separate chapters which exemplify the aesthetic and political concerns of this memorable period in American history and letters. Aside from its unique combination of artistic and political works, what makes this book important is the current revival of nationalist sentiment in African American life and arts. Though this revival is closely identified with the nationalism of the 1960s, it lacks the focus of that period. This study explains what gave the nationalism of the 1960s its focus, how that focus was expressed in art forms, and why 1960s nationalism continues to influence the African American identity and will probably do so well into the twenty-first century.

The Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement PDF Author: James Smethurst
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080787650X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.

The Ideologies of African American Literature

The Ideologies of African American Literature PDF Author: Robert E. Washington
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742509504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This book challenges the long-held assumption that African American literature aptly reflects black American social consciousness. Offering a novel sociological approach, Washington delineates the social and political forces that shaped the leading black literary works. Washington shows that deep divisions between political thinkers and writers prevailed throughout the 20th century. Visit our website for sample chapters!

The African American Sonnet

The African American Sonnet PDF Author: Timo Müller
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496817869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel," Gwendolyn Brooks's "First fight. Then fiddle." Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets. Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Müller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history. He examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. In this book, Müller examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe. In the tightly circumscribed space of sonnets, these poets mounted evocative challenges to the discursive and material boundaries they confronted.

African American Literary Theory

African American Literary Theory PDF Author: Winston Napier
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814758096
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
Fifty-one essays by writers such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as critics and academics such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. examine the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through the present. Contributions are organized chronologically beginning with the rise of a black aesthetic criticism, through the Black Arts Movement, feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The Circumstances of Living and Working for African-American Writers in the 1960s

The Circumstances of Living and Working for African-American Writers in the 1960s PDF Author: Susanne Opel
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638406067
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: The 1960s were a decade of changes for everyone in the USA. The Civil Rights Movement was at its height, while the assassinations of important personalities such as John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X, as well as Vietnam and the Cold War overshadowed the lives and thoughts of a whole generation. Hippie Culture, the anti-war movement, and the sexual revolution created a whole new generation with a new set of values. For the arts, for culture, and for the sciences the 1960s were a period of new developments that influenced the following decades immensely: the Beatles, worldwide TV shows, or the first man on the moon, just to name a few. Compared to their peers of periods, adolescents and unmarried young adults of the 1960s enjoyed greater social freedom and mobility and also were less tolerant of the socio-political subjugation of black people. The 1960s were also the decade in which African-American literature reached a new climax after the Harlem Renaissance in the twenties. There were a lot of new possibilities for African-Americans, but still also a lot to fight for. Being an African-American writer was a constant struggle, not only to earn money to survive , but also to gain the same acceptance as a white writer, or to help change something for the other African-Americans. Chester Himes wrote in his essay Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in U.S. (1966): From the start the American Negro writer is beset by conflicts. He is in conflict with himself, with his environment, with his public. The personal conflict will be the hardest. He must decide at the outset the extent of his honesty. He will find it no easy thing to reveal the truth of his experience or even to discover it. He will derive no please from the recounting of his hurts. He will encounter more agony by his explorations into his own personality than most non-Negroes realize. For him to delineate the degrading effects of oppression will be like inflicting a wound upon himself. He will have begun an intellectual crusade that will take him through the horrors of the damned. And this must be his reward for his integrity: he will be reviled by the Negroes and whites alike. Most of all, he will find no valid interpretation of his experiences in terms of human values until the truth be known. If he does not discover this truth, his life will be forever veiled in mystery, not only to whites, but to himself; and he will be heir to all the weird interpretations of his personality.

Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980

Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980 PDF Author: Kalenda C. Eaton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This book examines how cultural and ideological reactions to activism in the post-Civil Rights Black community were depicted in fiction written by Black women writers, 1965–1980. By recognizing and often challenging prevailing cultural paradigms within the post-Civil Rights era, writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Paule Marshall fictionalized the black community in critical ways that called for further examination of progressive activism after the much publicized 'end' of the Civil Rights Movement. Through their writings, the authors’ confronted marked shifts within African American literature, politics and culture that proved detrimental to the collective 'wellness' of the community at large.

Invisibility in African American and Asian American Literature

Invisibility in African American and Asian American Literature PDF Author: Klara Szmańko
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786439521
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
The book is a comparative study of the invisibility trope in African American and Asian American literature. It distinguishes between various kinds of invisibility and offers a genealogy of the term while providing a theoretical dissection of the invisibility trope itself. Investigating the various ways of striving for visibility, the author places special emphasis on the need for cooperation among various racial groups. While the book explores invisibility in a variety of African American and Asian American literary texts, the main focus is on four novels: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. The book not only sheds light on the oppressed but also exposes the structures of oppression and the apparatus of power, which often renders itself invisible. Throughout the study the author emphasizes that power is multi-directional, never flowing only in one direction. The book brings to light mechanisms of oppression within the dominant society as well as within and between marginalized racial groups.

Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities

Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities PDF Author: Rychetta Watkins
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617031623
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Images of upraised fists, afros, and dashikis have long dominated the collective memory of Black Power and its proponents. The “guerilla” figure—taking the form of the black-leather-clad revolutionary within the Black Panther Party—has become an iconic trope in American popular culture. That politically radical figure, however, has been shaped as much by Asian American cultural discourse as by African American political ideology. From the Asian-African Conference held in April of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, onward to the present, Afro-Asian political collaboration has been active and influential. In Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities, author Rychetta Watkins uses the guerilla figure as a point of departure and shows how the trope's rhetoric animates discourses of representation and identity in African American and Asian American literature and culture. In doing so, she examines the notion of “Power,” in terms of ethnic political identity, and explores collaborating—and sometimes competing—ethnic interests that have drawn ideas from the concept. The project brings together a range of texts—editorial cartoons, newspaper articles, novels, visual propaganda, and essays—that illustrate the emergence of this subjectivity in Asian American and African American cultural productions during the Power period, roughly 1966 through 1981. After a case study of the cultural politics of academic anthologies and the cooperation between Frank Chin and Ishmael Reed, the volume culminates with analyses of this trope in Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Alice Walker's Meridian, and John Okada's No No Boy.